Ava watches you scroll. Not the chart—your fills.
“Yesterday you survived weather,” she says. “Today we stop sinking from tiny holes you drilled yourself.”
Same canvas: $10,000 account, ETH plan, $100 max risk, −8% invalidation, +8% / +20% targets.
You missed the first clean push out of the range. It happens. What happens next is the real leak. The dashboard lights up with green ticks in other pairs; your fingers move before your rules do. Click. Click. Click.
On the ledger it looks harmless: three small market orders in mid-liquidity alts. In the tape it looks like this: spread widens from $0.003 to $0.012, depth thins, you chase a tick, get a worse fill, and then another. You close them minutes later when they don’t “go.” Fees plus about 0.15% of slippage each adds up to ~$29 per trade on your sizes—~$87 in ninety seconds. Almost your full day’s risk without taking a real trade.
Ava doesn’t scold. She circles the line: “Execution friction is real P&L.”
“Flat is a position,” she says. “But only if you let it be one.”
You set a rule together: max three tickets a day, all pre-written before the session starts. Not three impulses—three allowed decisions. If the setup you planned doesn’t show, you finish with unused tickets. It feels ridiculous to need a leash for your own mouse. Then you try it. The next choppy day you take none. Your P&L curve is a straight line instead of a slow bleed. Boredom visits. Red doesn’t.
“Good,” Ava says. “Now decide how you will behave when you are wrong.”
You think about your worst pattern: three losses and then the big one you took to “get it back.” You remember the thud in your chest while it printed against you, the numbness after. Ava writes a single sentence and slides it over:
“Three red trades → half size tomorrow + one day off.”
It’s not punishment; it’s containment. A circuit breaker for a human brain that runs hot. You run the mental week: three stops at −$100 each (−$300). Under the rule, your next attempt is −$50 max or +$? if it works. The old week ended −$1,000. This one ends −$350 and a decent night’s sleep. The market didn’t change. Your edge to keep learning did.
Ava opens your journal to a blank page. “Write the things you think you’ll remember, then watch how fast you don’t.”
You log three columns: Structure seen / Action taken / What would force a change. No poetry. No revenge. When you read it back later, the story is simple: you followed your plan or you didn’t. The point isn’t blame. It’s cause and correction. You start catching your own patterns in the words: you chase most when alerts are off and you’re tab-watching; you cut winners early when size is a hair too big; you move stops when you haven’t slept. The journal turns fog into handles.
That afternoon gives you a test. ETH wobbles with no structure—noise, not signal. Your hand twitches toward a small-cap that’s moving on social heat. You look at the ticket cap—0/3 used—and you still don’t take it. The cap isn’t there to allow three bad decisions. It’s there to stop the fourth.
Later, your planned setup actually appears: retest, volume real, risk defined. You take one ticket, calmly. It stops. −$100. You close the platform and go for a walk. The day ends red on purpose, not from a thousand tiny cuts you can’t remember giving yourself.
That night you do the math you’ve been avoiding: last month’s fees and slippage across all venues. The number looks like a soft tax you never voted for. You trim one exchange you use out of habit and route more through the book that absorbs size better. You add a rule: no market orders on thin books; if the spread is a canyon, you wait or you pass. The next week, the friction line drops. The setups feel the same. The account doesn’t.
Ava closes your notebook. “Tidy hands, quiet head. That’s not a personality trait. It’s a system.”
The screen is still. Your breathing is even. You notice something small: you aren’t trying to make the market forgive you anymore. You’re trying to trade cleanly. That’s new.
“Good,” Ava says. “Now you’re ready to measure your edge across twenty trades without confusing it with noise you created.”
You put the cap back on the pen and feel the room level under your feet.
Pocket anchors
Field drill (2 min • log + sticky note)
Total last week’s fees + slippage across venues; write the number at the top of your log. Place a sticky note above your monitor: “Max 3 tickets. No market orders on thin books. 3 reds → half size + 1 day off.” Read it out loud before you trade.